attorneys

A recent policy change at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services now allows for child welfare systems to draw federal funds to help pay for the legal counsel of all children and birth parents involved in the child welfare systems.

On Wednesday, The Imprint will publish its first installment of “Hearings,” a series of stories from a corner of the law that is not reported on enough – America’s child welfare courts.

My 16-year old client – a young woman who had already spent several years in foster care – just wanted to share her story in court. She hoped to tell the judge the ways in which group home staff were mistreating her.

A major barrier to funding legal representation in the child welfare system was basically just eradicated with an update to the question-and-answer section of a federal manual. Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made clear that Title IV-E, the federal entitlement program for child welfare services, can now be used to pay for legal support to children and parents who are involved with the child welfare system.

A trove of court and casework footage is now available for agencies and universities looking to make child welfare and juvenile justice training more dynamic. Calamari Productions, the small production company quietly behind several award-winning documentaries and TV shows about those two fields, has made its massive archive of system-related footage available for educational licensing through “Calamari in the Classroom.”

Not all children in child welfare cases in Washington state are entitled to a lawyer to represent them in dependency court, according to a ruling earlier this month from a divided Washington State Supreme Court.

by Dawn J. Post and Sarah McCarthy Rachel Canning, the New Jersey high school senior who sued her parents for child support, has been almost universally depicted as entitled and spoiled,  and the case she brought has been called absurd.

The foster care alumni movement asserts that child welfare professionals must meet increasingly higher standards of knowledge the more they influence the lives of at-risk youth. This is especially true for non-alumni whose decisions affect the most foster children.